Policy Diffusion and Translation: The Case of Health Agencies

A governança facilitada no Mercosul: transferência de políticas e integração nas áreas de educação, migração e saúde

“…The recent development of a research agenda on policy transfer has been favored by the processes of globalization and regionalization, as stressed by different authors (Evans and Davies, 1999;Stone 1999Stone , 2004Hassenteufel et al, 2017;Porto de Oliveira and Faria, 2017). One of the main challenges of this agenda has been to differentiate concepts such as transfer, diffusion and convergence (Stone, 2004;Dolowitz, 2017;Porto de Oliveira and Faria, 2017).…”

A prelude to policy transfer research

“…Some of these are abstract, such as ideas, ideologies, principles, discourses, paradigms and so on, while others are more concrete, such as policy models and designs, laws and constitutions, administrative arrangements, forms of government, policy instruments, institutions, etc. To mention just a few examples, scholars have dedicated their research to understand transfer, diffusion, and circulation of the following objects: democratic institutions and participatory democracy (Huntington, 1993;Porto de Oliveira, 2017;Simmons et al, 2010), regulatory agencies (Levi-Faur and Jordana, 2005), pensions (Brooks, 2005), migration policies (Braz, 2018;Channac, 2006;Infantino, 2019), social policies (Kuhlmann et al, 2020;Weyland, 2006), conditional cash transfers (Howlett et al, 2018;Leisering, 2019; Morais de Sá e Silva, 2017; Osorio Gonnet, 2019), transport policies (Ardila, 2020;Mejía-Dugand et al, 2013;Montero, 2017;Wood, 2015b), disaster reduction (Soremi, 2019), rule of law (Dezalay and Garth, 2002), evidence-based health agencies (Hassenteufel et al, 2017), microfinance (Oikawa Cordeiro, 2019), harm reduction (Baker et al, 2020), and administrative capacities (Hadjiisky, 2017), amongst other "objects". An important feature of policy transfer dynamics is that, as will be discussed later, public policies are not transplanted, and don't necessarily displace, as a monolithic block, but instead different policy instruments and components, coming from different origins, are combined and translated to meet the demands in the context and expectations of transfer agents.…”

“…The variations of policies when they are adopted were already sketched in Richard Rose's work (1991), who distinguished five ideal types of adaptations: copy, emulation, synthesis, hybridization, and inspiration. As mentioned in the previous section, this process of policies being modified while traveling has been termed "translation" (Hassenteufel et al, 2017;Hassenteufel and de Maillard, 2013;Porto de Oliveira and Pal, 2018;Stone, 2012Stone, , 2017 and assemblages (Clarke et al, 2015;McCann and Ward, 2011). Translations do not necessarily take place in the realm of policy design, but they can be related to its semantic nature, the discourse and the political ideas underlying the instrument traveling in time and space.…”

“…Attempting to understand how, what, when, and under which circumstances policies travel and the effects of this movement, the literature informs us that policy transfers occur in many different ways (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000;Hadjiisky et al, 2017;Porto de Oliveira and Pal, 2018). In a nutshell, policy transfers involve a plethora of agents (Dunlop, 2009;Laidi, 2005;Pal, 2012;Stone, 2001), with diverse narratives (Cabral et al, 2013), operating in multiple arenas (Baker and Walker, 2019;Porto de Oliveira and Pal, 2018), with unequal power relationships (Dolowitz et al, 2020b), following different directions (Osorio Gonnet, 2019) and geographies (Milhorance, 2018), with distinct time intensities (Peck and Theodore, 2015;Wood, 2015a), generating heterogeneous effects and transformations, as assemblages (Clarke et al, 2015;McCann and Ward, 2011), bricolages (Stone, 2017), or translations (Hassenteufel et al, 2017).…”

Born in the USA? A Comparison of “Inspired” Health Care Reforms in Germany and France

“…Eventually, this type of assessment was not implemented because of oppositions and debates on the methods used. The expertise and reformulation of cost-effectiveness assessment in a "German way" was largely undertaken by medical experts with training in health economics, which also explains the close integration of IQWIG into the self-governing bodies of the health system (Hassenteufel et al 2017).…”